Books: The Blood Jet Is Poetry

On a dank day in February 1963, a pretty young mother of two children
was found in a London flat with her head in the oven and the gas jets
wide open. The dead woman was Sylvia Plath, 30, an American poet whose
marriage to Ted Hughes, a British poet, had gone on the rocks not long
before. Her published verses, appearing occasionally in American
magazines and gathered in a single volume, The Colossus, had displayed
accents of refinement, but had not yet achieved authority of tone.